Today I updated my bitwarden self host server (Debian 12). I launched the 2 cli command :
./bitwarden.sh updateself
then
./bitwarden.sh update.
The process seems to be ok, message saying ‘Up and running’, as usually. But Bitwarden doesn’t work anymore (addon or webpage). I’ve searched in the different file logs and I got error message in the nginx log :
/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf" failed (13: Permission denied) in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Nothing has been modified for months, excepted the smtp server.
Same issue here, upgraded from 2025.7.3-beta to 2025.8.0-beta self host docker image via portainer, up and running with no errors, and now the browser extension can’t sync and while I can load the webpage and attempt to log in with any user, it just spins forever after submitting the password. Also strange is that I get a "Your Bitwarden account was just logged into from a new device.” confirmation email when I attempt to log in like the back end thinks it’s been successful, but it just hangs on the password submission and the vault never appears.
Problem is the bitwarden-web container, which shows this error in the docker logs:
chown: unknown user/group bitwarden:bitwarden
error: failed switching to “bitwarden:bitwarden”: unable to find user bitwarden: no matching entries in passwd file
While the system has a bitwarden group, it indeed doesn’t have the user. Creating the user removed the error, but the process still crashes continuously, now without errors.
I too have hit this same wall. This is causing no access to my Bitwarden instance. Hopefully Bitwarden devs will fix this very soon. And they should probably pull that last update (2025.8.0) before it breaks more self-hosted installs.
I’m on Debian 11 and when I tried updating to 2025.5.3 (from 2025.3.0) the server broke. It suspended the organization overnight and we had to roll back the VM that it is hosted on to eventually fix it. I tried updating yesterday to 2025.8.0 due to the issues with the web browser clients not being able to connect and after the update I can’t reach the bitwarden servers at all, through the client or in a browser window. I am using the docker installation and have not altered anything else.
Similar situation: Though my Docker installation is an old root user install. Running as root and also non-root, standard user running into: nginx: [emerg] open() “/etc/nginx/conf.d/default.conf” failed (13: Permission denied) in /etc/nginx/nginx.conf:148
I have performed the requisite steps from Linux Standard Deployment. I believe I ran into this a couple of years ago when trying to go non-root, but couldn’t get it to work, so continued running bitwarden.sh as root (despite the warnings). Guess now we’re forced.
Do I need to uninstall and install? Is there a document for how to do this safely?
Hoping for some guidance to resolve - thanks in advance!
Unfortunately even after I chmod the nginix.conf file in the container and restart, it still is acting strangely. Now I can enter login and password, but it fails on 2FA saying invalid 2FA, both browser and web. Reverted back to 2025.7.3 which is working great, waiting for 2025.8.2, maybe that’ll do the trick.
I have the same issue. I updated from 7.1 (I think) to 8.1 (latest automatically pulled). The web and nginx containers wouldn’t start.
I changed the permissions as described here, and nginx started but web didn’t.
I then went into docker-compose.yml and saw that while every container was set to 8.1, the web container was set to 8.2. I changed it to 8.1 (and changed config.yml to not rebuild the file automatically), then restarted and it now works.
However, I can’t update further this way.
Is this issue being looked at? I see the github issue was closed, but clearly it’s not solved.
Further to the above, my bitwarden-web error log (if I allow it to update to 8.2) keeps saying:
chown: unknown user/group bitwarden:bitwarden
error: failed switching to “bitwarden:bitwarden”: unable to find user bitwarden: no matching entries in passwd file
However, a bitwarden user exists and has always existed on this server.
I noticed that the entire bwdata directory had switched user:group to nobody:nogroup. I wondered if that had to do with it. I looked at uid.env, and sure enough user and group were set to 65534 in there.
I changed them back to bitwarden UID and GID, rebuilt and restarted, and now it works fine.
I have no idea when uid.env changed to 65534, I’ve never paid any attention to the user:group of the bwdata directory. I’ve been running this installation since 2021, and it was a migrated database (and bwdata directory) from another server from 2019, so many years of flawless running and updates.
Still can’t get 8.1 to work, nor does the update try to get 8.2. Tried the owner change for bwdata, to no avail (it was nobody for 7.1 without any problems). Error in the web container remains …
tried everything mentioned here.
Nothing worked. Permissions are ok. But nginx won’t come up.
I don’t have any ideas and I don’t wont to re-install BW.
The bwdata directory changes to permissions to nouser:group here. 2025.8.1 works perfectly fine and permissions are set to bitwarden:bitwarden for bwdata.